Ke$ha continues to inspire and infect The Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne announces new collaborative album

Exclaim! is reporting that in a recent Reddit AMA session, ‘Animal’ Wayne Coyne let it be known that not only do The Flaming Lips have an album coming out April 16 (titled The Terror, courtesy of Warner Bros./Bella Union), but another, more refined musical endeavor is also on the horizon. Coyne queefed the glitter-covered and booze-soaked nugget of news that the Lips will be putting out a full-length collaboration with the stuttering, ghost-fucking, dinosaur aping Warrior herself, Ke$ha.

The Flaming Lips and Ke$ha have worked together before, though, first on TFL’s duets album from 2012, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, then on Ke$ha’s most recent album Warrior, with the Lips overseeing a single track from the otherwise Dr. Luke and Max Martin-produced album. Wayne noted of Ke$ha (née Kesha Rose Sebert) that, “She’s funny, she’s humble. She’s badass. She’s everything. She’s awesome.” Note to readers: if you want to impress Wayne Coyne, give him a vial of your blood.

No release date was announced, but we did learn that the album will be cleverly named Lip$ha. Expect songs about robots, cannibalism, filth, and you just being you. Hey, maybe the two artists actually have way more in common than originally thought…

For all the rabid Ke$ha fans who frequent TMT, my buddy who recently did a drag performance of a Ke$ha track at a house party that included Jurassic Park-themed props (think small cup of water) and back up dancers in t-rex masks pointed me to two unreleased Ke$ha tracks, both below. Blah, blah, blah, enjoy.

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m no scientist. If I was a scientist, do you think I’d be writing about music on the internet? Of course not. I’d be telling my science buddies about music in person while we invented time machines or whatever. As it stands, I was an English major, and I have neither real scientific skills nor any buddies to speak of. Even so, I’ve heard a segment or two of the popular program Radiolab, so I feel pretty confident talking about most science-y subjects. For example, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which is basically the principle that states “when you look at something too closely, it gets harder to understand.”

Take it from me when I say that Arrington de Dionyso’s (everyone’s favorite purveyor of throat singing and throat singing accessories) upcoming tour with his band Malaikat dan Singa is basically all the confirmation you need that the uncertainty principle is, you know, a thing. I mean just look at it! A huge chunk of those dates are TBA!! One of them just lists “Ohio” as the location! THAT’S A WHOLE STATE! Ladies and gentleman, it does not get much more uncertain than that. Science confirmed. I mean, I guess it could get a little more uncertain. Maybe if he just listed “Earth” as the location for all of them, but Arrington knows how to walk a line, he knows that would’ve been too uncertain.

Confirmation of scientific principles aside, this is an extensive tour, and one that does not suffer from the all-too-common plight of “not coming anywhere near my house” (give it a gander, I’ll bet you a bitcoin and a half that it comes close to your house too). The tour is in support of de Dionyso’s upcoming release with Malaikat dan Singa Open the Crown. If it’s anything like 2011’s Suara Naga (TMT Review), its combo of jagged rhythms, skronky clarinet, and throat singing will punch right through any of your lingering uncertainty and make you dance like no one but de Dionyso himself is watching. Open the Crown is out April 30, and you can pre-order it right now from K Records. Until then, check out the video for “I Create in the Broken System” off the album below:

You know, our own James Parker was right in his review of Sun Araw’s most recent effort The Inner Treaty (TMT review). Sun Araw do sort of lend themselves to verbose, ostentatious descriptions. That being said, the purveyors of languid, interstellar-island-psych jams (see? I know some words!) better known as Sun Araw are taking the show overseas to peddle the aforementioned jams to the Old World.

Hot off an appearance at Unisex Earplug, TMT’s first (unofficial) South by Southwest showcase, and collaborating on an art installation (I’m assuming this was a real story, I don’t really trust anything published on the internet on April 1, regardless of the source), Cameron Stallones is packing up his pedals, synths, and shit for Europe. The tour hits up a lot of those tiny countries I can’t find on a map — my sincerest apologies to our Latvian readers — so I did get a nice little geography lesson while writing this piece. It wraps up in Berlin at a venue called West Germany and I know just enough about history and geography to be confused by the venue’s name. The American public school system didn’t completely fail me in that regard, teaching me that the Berlin Wall fell in my lifetime.

Part-time Sun Araw member and fellow ambient dude (okay, I ran out of words) Deep Magic a.k.a. Alex Gray (a.k.a. DJ/PURPLE/IMAGE) will be joining Sun Araw on a bunch of the dates. A new Deep Magic album, titled Reflections of Most Forgotten Love, will be out on Preservation. It should be noted that Dracula Lewis, Love Cult and Diva + Matthewdavid are also making appearances on the tour.

Whenever I hear about an album being reissued, my first question is always “why should I buy that?” Even if it’s an album I love and it’s been remastered, I’m always hesitant. Only when I feel like my experience or understanding of the album can be enhanced do I indulge in one of the endless string of reissues that get brought out every month.

Well it seems like Light in the Attic is trying to grab the attention of discerning music buyers such as myself with their reissue of Public Image Ltd’s album First Issue. They’ve reproduced the original LP sleeve and included extras like a poster, news clipping, and stickers. A little more bang for your buck. Tack on that this is the first time this album has been properly released in the US and it sounds quite nearly like the perfect storm. The LP and 2CD editions are both up for preorder on Light in the Attic’s site, so they can be delivered straight to your doorstep upon June 18 release.

In a perverted, masochistic way, I enjoyed the sense of possibly-impending doom the supposed apocalypse brought to 2012. Somehow, even if I never really believed such a thing could or would occur, the pall of probably-not-but-what-if decimation felt novel bordering on epic. Brushing up against a sci-fi nightmare/dream brought a weight to things, for those of us disconnected enough from reality and with overactive imaginations.

The members of Robedoor seem to be similar overly-imaginative, end-of-the-world romantics. Their upcoming album Primal Sphere absolutely drips gritty SF; just check out the tracklisting. To me at least, the name of each track seems like a little snippet of a doomed world. There is also something poetic about being a year late to the cataclysm party, and I’m sure this has not escaped them. If I was a paranoid man I would say Hands in the Dark is, by releasing this album on May 14, attempting to start that catastrophe-clock again. This could just be wishful thinking on my part, though; the naïve part of me wants to live my sci-fi fantasy and Primal Sphere could be the perfect soundtrack.

If you’re reading this, then I am dead… tired of writing for this shit magazine. Congratulations on your overworked, underpaid, overlooked, under-appreciated position as an official journeyman TMT newswriter. Before I left, Mr P made me promise that I’d create a small list of pointers for future writers here, and even though I told him to go stick it, I’m such a goddamn font of productivity that I couldn’t help but think of a few, so I figured I’d jot them down for you. Good luck, suckers.

1) If you discover that an artist whom you’ve started writing about has tourdates listed that are not already formatted in the usual TMT way, don’t write that story. But don’t un-reserve it either. No one else will want it.

2) The editors “say” they want you to embed stuff rather than use gratuitous links that carry readers away from the TMT website, but that rule never applies to that Dave Grohl “Fresh Pots” video because every music fan always needs to see that right away.

3) Just leave Jeff Tweedy alone.

4) While it’s always funny and appropriate to make up fake nicknames for venerable Pixies frontman Frank “Black ‘Prankie Blackstar’ Francis” Black, it’s important to remember that that dude is huge and scary, and that he does tour the US every once in a while in support of some such frustratingly un-Pixies project or another. And He will not hesitate to totally find you and eat your fingers. If you don’t believe me, just ask my speech-to-text assistant program about the last time I jerk-off sleeping at the yuppie’s summer pudding, knishes?